The Brass Ring = Impeachment

The sweet smell of bacon frying in the morning...ahhh...it smells like victory! The headlines calling for Karl Rove's head warm the cockles of my heart.

But let's not forget that we're going for the whole enchilada. Remember when President Backed Into a Corner met with a criminal lawyer last year at the time that federal prosecutors were initially questioning White House staff about the Plame case? I hope he has that number handy, because Karl Rove is this administration's Monica Lewinsky. Oh yes. And I mean that on several different levels.

Let's not forget that the whistleblower here, Joseph Wilson, was outing the administration's reasons for invading Iraq as lies and damn lies. Rove's calls to Cooper and others were meant to plant false allegations to try to discredit Wilson because Wilson was standing up and talking about the IMPEACHABLE OFFENSE of taking the nation to war under false pretenses.

I'm suddenly very pissed and very hungry.

Conduct Unbecoming

If you missed this opinion piece by Burton J. Lee III, former physician to George H.W. Bush, in the Washington Post last week it might have been because you were scratching your head wondering what the hell Attorney General Alberto "The Enforcer" Gonzales was doing in Iraq.

Chris Floyd connects the dots rather nicely, and every U.S. senator should read this before they even consider this little evil man for the Supreme Court. He had the nerve to blame the abuses at Abu Ghraib on the NIGHT SHIFT of one cell block. This administration has no shame in using cliches to lie about, excuse and rationalize criminal conduct performed at its command.

Next thing you know he'll be saying his dog ate the Constitution.

Thanks to Smirking Chimp for the link.

Bush Falls off Bike...AGAIN

Jeez, what is it with this guy? Was he chewing gum AND pedaling?

Say...maybe that's why his secret service detail didn't interrupt his bike ride in May when a Cessna violated restricted airspace near the White House and Capitol Hill had to be evacuated. Maybe he loses his balance at the slightest distraction. Maybe he drinks and bikes at the same time.

He clearly needs training wheels.

Sarah Vowell is who I'd like to be when I grow up and she's a guest columnist for the New York Times this week. She has a pithy take on the Live 8 concert today.

Seeing Robertson in that commercial with Bono - and Bono's hair - is a little like listening to Paul Anka's new recording of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit." At first, it's jarring to hear the guy who wrote "Puppy Love" for Donny Osmond sing Kurt Cobain's lyrics: "a mosquito, my libido." But listen hard and you can hear what Anka hears. He doesn't hear the ranting of weirdos. He hears the poetry, the architecture of a justifiably standard song like "Autumn in New York," like "Fly Me to the Moon."

My soft spot for strange bedfellows aside, I am a capital-D Democrat who still believes in the value of partisan politics. And I hold onto that belief despite the fact that I belong to a party whose only true talent is writing exceedingly eloquent concession speeches.

Cool
Our dear Professor made The Smirking Chimp. Now we could get him to blog.

The Beauty of Innuendoes

Durbin's remarks were not aimed, not even implicitly, at Holocaust victims or at your average soldier on patrol in Baghdad. He did want to say both directly and indirectly that all people under U.S. detention, no matter what we happen to think about their guilt or innocence, should not be subjected to certain kinds of treatment. But by construing his remarks as innuendo, Durbin's opponents were able to sidestep that discussion.

Impeachment's just another word...

...unless Dean, Biden, Reid, et al, grab this opportunity to keep the idea alive and in the news.

The latest Zogby poll included a question about impeachment and a healthy 42% agreed that Congress should impeach George Bush if he misled the country into going to war in Iraq. And that included 25% of Republicans responding to the survey. (IF he misled the country? Were his lips moving?)

These numbers will grow alongside our ballooning deficit and, unfortunately, the number of casualties in the "war on terra."
We have nothing left to lose.

Dear Democratic Leadership

Please stop apologizing for telling the truth. We must focus on the midterm elections. We must capitalize on Bush & Co. falling poll numbers. They have made a mess in Afghanistan and Iraq, and made a sham of our democracy.

I understand we do not have the votes to impeach right now. But if Republicans and Democrats who face midterm re-election can be made to feel the growing disillusionment of Americans, they may see their way clear to stand up against this administration. We cannot let them get away with the criminal incompetence and corruption of the last four and a half years.

Please get tough and stop criticizing each other. You all should have closed ranks around Senator Durbin and focused on the abuse and torture he was condemning, not on a metaphor blown out of proportion to distract attention from the abuse and torture.

Keep your eye on the ball!

Sincerely,
a true-blue Democrat.

Drunk on Freedom

That's exactly what you are if tonight between 7pm and 8pm CST, you watched any of the big three networks, cable news, or CSPAN; played a drinking game; AND picked the correct word: FREEDOM as your cue. According to Think Progress, that is.

The latest propaganda event brought to you by Karl Rove and his Flying Feces Productions, gave the chimp another chance to listen to the sound of his own voice bring tears to his beady eyes in front of another captive military audience.

When that little bastard tears up you just know that he's touched, not by real courage and bravery of true heroes and patriots, but by the momentary illusion of his own fake humanity. When he thinks of you he touches himself.

I may vomit.

Strategery = Abduction & Torture

Last week when Karl Rove criticized liberal responses to 9/11 for presumably wanting "to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers," he specifically singled out MoveOn.org as one of the targets of his criticism. Eli Pariser was said by the New York Times to have responded by asserting that MoveOn had not opposed military action in Afghanistan. Pariser then rightly criticized the administration for trying to deflect attention from its own failures and problems.

What's wrong with the first part of Pariser's response is that it plays the administration's game inadvertently. In deriding a desire to prepare indictments Rove is attempting to discredit a more effective response to terrorism than the dubious war strategy Bush & Co. have embraced. If you doubt me, follow the details of the arrest orders against 13 CIA officials issued by an Italian Judge for their role in kidnapping an Egyptian cleric in Milan who was taken to Egypt and allegedly tortured.

Although there's alot to be said here, my key point is that the rendition of this terror suspect reportedly "disrupted Italian efforts to identify his connection to a terror network believed to have active operations throughout Europe," and that in other countries the effort to capture and convict terrorists has been stymied and undone by the Bush regime's lack of cooperation. Bush & Co. are not merely deriding effective legal responses to terrorism, they are actively subverting them.

We should not forget that the rush to unity after 9/11 was an attempt to make war, first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq apear to be the only justifiable alternative.

Thanks to the Professor.

Learn the Truth

If you have friends or loved ones serving in the U.S. Military, of if you give a damn about the two wars we are waging in the Middle East, you might want to check out this web site.

Operation Truth is an organization made up of non-partisan veterans. This web site has a lot of information about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that you won't see on the evening news, or read in your local newspapers.

Thanks to Kate over at Broken Windows for the info and link.

Go read Kate for first and second-hand news from the front.

M'aidez

Last week Tbogg had this photo posted. "My God," I said, "she looks like a Sith!"

Today's Boondocks.

The transformation is complete.

TIME Magazine Dabbles in Freeper Porn

I’ve just finished my first paper of the semester (a charming bon mot about the relationship between Jeffersonian Anglo-Saxon nationalism and racial ethnology) and given that I already have a headache, I figured a look-see around the net couldn’t possibly hurt.

Christ was I wrong!

If you haven’t already seen it, Here’s TIME magazine’s latest cover girl. Ms. Right indeed. Gross.

I’m not going to read the piece. My brain is not so fried as to not feel the pain of Ms. Coulter’s non-logic. One of the depressing things I’ve realized, particularly after spending the weekend on this paper, is that Coulter is part of along WASP-y tradition beginning before the revolution that declares Anglo-Americans as the true heirs to ancient Anglo-Saxon democratic values. Coulter’s rhetoric of “invading their countries and converting them to Christianity,” abhorrent as it may be, is quite as American as apple pie.

Discouraging n’est-ce pas?

However, just because Coulter isn’t technically un-American, that doesn’t mean we have to stop treating her like the lunatic throwback she is. This means NOT reading TIME, canceling your subscription , and telling them that you’re offended at their foray into the obscene. For fuck’s sake, there is a war going on! Coulter’s shtick is over 200 years old. It’s not going anywhere. Bring on the news already.

293,027,571 pairs of rose-colored glasses, please

Ironically, one reason why Washington can persuade the outside world that its venture in Iraq is finally coming right is that it is too dangerous for reporters to travel outside Baghdad or stray far from their hotels in the capital.

OK, note to American reporters: if it's too dangerous to leave your hotel, then the situation is getting worse not better.

Most violent incidents in Iraq go unreported...Last year US soldiers told the IoS that they do not tell their superiors about attacks on them unless they suffer casualties. This avoids bureaucratic hassle and "our generals want to hear about the number of attacks going down not up". This makes the official Pentagon claim that the number of insurgent attacks is down from 140 a day in January to 40 a day this month dubious.

Boy, does that tactic sound familiar.

The White House finds its military commitment in Iraq politically damaging at home. The easiest way to bring the troops home is, as in Vietnam, to declare a victory and full confidence in US-trained Iraqi forces to win the war. These soldiers and police supposedly number 152,000, but it is not clear who. The figure may include the 14,000 blue-uniformed Iraqi police in Nineveh province, the capital of which is Mosul, with a population of 2.7 million. But Khasro Goran, the deputy governor and Kurdistan Democratic Party leader in Mosul, told the IoS that the police had helped insurgents assassinate the previous governor.

Mr Goran said that when guerrillas captured almost all of Mosul on 11 November last year, the police had collaborated, abandoning 30 police stations without a fight. "They didn't fire on terrorists because they were terrorists themselves," he said. Some $40m-worth of arms and equipment was captured by the insurgents.

It is a measure of how far the reality of the war in Iraq now differs from the rosy picture presented by the media that the fall of Mosul to the insurgents went almost unreported abroad because most journalists were covering the assault by the US marines on Fallujah.

So we lost Mosul in November; we're training terrorists and counting them among the forces we are confident can "win" the war that we declared victory in over a year ago; our guys are hamstrung by leaders who don't want to hear bad news or properly arm them; and our biggest stories have been Terri Schiavo, Michael Jackson and the pope, with Tom Delay's shenanigans thrown in for balance. Terri and the pope are dead. Toss Michael Jackson and Tom Delay in jail, and be done with it.

We are at war and people are dying needlessly every single day. Can't that be taken seriously by the goddamn news?

Jesus

At least 16 people were killed when an American military helicopter crashed in bad weather near the town of Ghazni, south of the capital Kabul, an American military spokeswoman said.

The American spokeswoman, Cindy Moore, said that 18 people were listed as having been aboard the helicopter. It was not known, however, whether the two people unaccounted for had actually boarded the aircraft.

Nor had the nationalities of all the victims been determined, she said.

I missed the death of the Pope because I was off watching Sin City and studying. And after reading this, I'm really not sorry that I did.

...the conversation has been conducted almost exclusively among men. It's like that recent God panel on Meet the Press that consisted of five men theologizing, with Jon Meacham of Newsweek mewing the most awful pious twaddle, at one point using Bush and Dante in the same sentence with a straight face.

Ick.

As a laspsed Catholic I can't quite bring myself to completely disregard the Pope's death. But c'mon people. This has been coming for ages. Stop mourning and rejoice that the man no longer has to suffer the indiginity of the mortal coil.

Now I'm off to an early bedtime because I'm getting sick. I think that God is punishing me for the whole Sin City thing.

What Do We Do with a Drunken Liar?

If we're the CIA and it's 2001, we codename him Curveball, invade a country and kill thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people, based on his wacky stories of biological weapons programs.

If the headline on thisGuardian special report isn't enough to make you choke on your oatmeal, the very first line will.

An alcoholic cousin of an aide to Ahmed Chalabi has emerged as the key source in the US rationale for going to war in Iraq.

"An alchoholic cousin of an aide..."??!!??

According to a US presidential commission looking into pre-war intelligence failures, the basis for pivotal intelligence on Iraq's alleged biological weapons programmes and fleet of mobile labs was a spy described as 'crazy' by his intelligence handlers and a 'congenital liar' by his friends.

The defector, given the code-name Curveball by the CIA, has emerged as the central figure in the corruption of US intelligence estimates on Iraq. Despite considerable doubts over Curveball's credibility, his claims were included in the administration's case for war without caveat.

I say let's put him in a boat and row him over or at the very least hoist him up to the topsail yardarm. Nope, this kind of incompetent lunacy deserves a Congressional Medal of Honor.

Sweet Home Chicago

Gov. Rod Blagojevich filed an emergency rule Friday requiring pharmacies that sell contraceptives to fill prescriptions for birth control quickly, following recent incidents in which a Chicago pharmacist refused to fill orders for contraceptives because of moral opposition.

"Our regulation says that if a woman goes to a pharmacy with a prescription for birth control, the pharmacy or the pharmacist is not allowed to discriminate or to choose who he sells it to or who he doesn't sell it to," Blagojevich said. "The pharmacy will be expected to accept that prescription and fill it ... No delays. No hassles. No lectures."

Yet one more reason why I love the great state of Illinois. Democrats, take note. This is the way to do things.

The Contraceptive Nazis

Ok, this could be the start of something bad.

''There are pharmacists who will only give birth control pills to a woman if she's married. There are pharmacists who mistakenly believe contraception is a form of abortion and refuse to prescribe it to anyone," said Adam Sonfield of the Alan Guttmacher Institute in New York, which tracks reproductive issues. ''There are even cases of pharmacists holding prescriptions hostage, where they won't even transfer it to another pharmacy when time is of the essence."

Supporters see this as "...a welcome expression of personal belief"? Did anyone else just hear a toilet flush? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.

TBogg points out the hypocrisy quite nicely.

After reading the article you will notice that no mention is made of pharmacists declining to sell condoms, which are disposable gulags for the pre-Fetus-Americans. And ribbed condoms? Forget it, Sparky. Sex is for babies, not for pleasure. Well, her pleasure anyway.

If female pharmacists suddenly started refusing to dispense Viagra or Cialis to men, Congress would reconvene in the middle of the night and George Bush would make another midnight run from Crawford to sign the Tentpole Act of 2005 (also known as Bob Dole's Law).

What's next? Will the almighty pharmacist decide, in all his wisdom and selfrighteous willfulness, that the pesky rash you've been trying to get rid of is the punishment of a just God? No cortisone for you!

Ten Little Indians UPDATE

Ok, so it wasn't ten Indian kids who were killed at the high school on the Red Lake Indian reservation in Minnesota on Monday. It was six students (including the shooter), a security guard and a teacher, and the grandfather of the shooter as well as the grandfather's girlfriend. What can I say? I depend on the constant yammering of nattering nabobs to pound the details into my brain.

President Raised In A Barn finally offered his condolences today, five days after the fact. A White House spokesperson actually claimed Bush tried to get a hold of someone earlier in the week and got their voicemail.

I shit you not.

ADDED: Amanda over at Pandagon links to a Washington Post article detailing the dissatisfaction many Native Americans feel about Bush's lackluster response to the shootings.

"From all over the world we are getting letters of condolence, the Red Cross has come, but the so-called Great White Father in Washington hasn't said or done a thing," said Clyde Bellecourt, a Chippewa Indian who is the founder and national director of the American Indian Movement here. "When people's children are murdered and others are in the hospital hanging on to life, he should be the first one to offer his condolences. . . . If this was a white community, I don't think he'd have any problem doing that."